iPhone not king pig: Verizon 3G phone users gobble most data

iPhone users are notorious for their high data consumption, but according to a …

iPhone users may be notorious data hogs that have done nothing but pillage and plunder AT&T's network, but it's Verizon's smartphone users who consume the most data per month. That's according Validas (a company that optimizes wireless phone bills), which analyzed 20,000 wireless bills between January and May 2010 to find that Verizon smartphone users consume more data than iPhone users at a ratio of 1.25 to 1.

According to Validas, the average data consumption for non-Blackberry Verizon smartphones was 421MB per month, compared to the 338MB per month consumed by AT&T iPhone users. 11 percent of Verizon subscribers use between 500MB and 1GB per month, while only 5.6 percent of iPhone users do the same. In fact, although many iPhone users complained when AT&T recently put a 2GB data cap on its subscribers, only 1.6 percent of iPhone users used that much bandwidth according to Validas' data, compared to 4 percent of Verizon smartphone users.

(The company said it excluded Blackberrys from its analysis thanks to RIM's "data compression techniques," saying that the devices "do not follow similar data consumption patterns to those of iPhones and other Smartphones.")

iPhones aside, Validas says that the number of smartphone users who pay for data packages increased over the last year from 42 percent to 53 percent of total wireless subscribers in the US. The mean number of megabytes (or is that the BIGGER EM-BEES?) downloaded per user went up as well, from 96.8MB to 145.8MB. Verizon's customers were responsible for the largest increase in mean data usage among the four major US carriers, with T-Mobile coming in second and AT&T coming in third. Sprint saw a decrease in mean data usage largely because it gained new data customers that consumed 50MB or less.

This kind of analysis doesn't take into account some of the efforts cell carriers are making to reduce their data traffic, such as AT&T's WiFi "hot zones" that are specifically targeted toward heavy 3G-using markets. In fact, Validas might even encourage users to look into such solutions, as it would help users cut down on data overages and the resulting fees.